Authors: Rebecca Drake
Detective Ottilo greeted them in the lobby, offering them coffee, which Jill was glad to accept. It gave her something to do with her hands. He led them down a hallway, pausing outside a room similar to the one Jill had sat in alone only two weeks before. “We’ll be conducting separate interviews today, so if you’ll just have a seat in here, Mrs. Lassiter—”
Andrew cut him off. “Absolutely not. That was not agreed upon.”
“It’s standard procedure—”
“If you had advised me that you intended to formally interview my clients, I would have arranged for another attorney to be present.”
“No problem,” Ottilo said with a hard smile. “We’ll interview the Lassiters one at a time so you can be present for both.”
Andrew glanced at his watch. “Unfortunately, I have to be in court later today; you’ll have to reschedule.” He ushered Jill and David back up the hallway
“I could charge you with obstruction,” Ottilo said, hustling after them.
Andrew snorted. “I’d like to see that hold up.”
Ottilo stopped them in the lobby. “Fine,” he snapped, his usual composure gone. “We’ll do
today’s
interview together.”
Andrew and David exchanged a quick smile as they followed the detective back down the hall. Jill wasn’t optimistic that the upper hand would last. Ottilo ushered them into a larger room and shut the door hard behind them. Not quite a slam, but he was clearly upset. The detective grabbed a chair standing against the wall and hauled it to the far side of the table so there were three seats instead of two. “Sit down.” He pulled up his own seat across from them and slapped a folder onto the table, glancing toward the camera mounted in the opposite ceiling corner and angled to give it a full view. He cleared his throat, “Okay, for the record I’m Detective Michael Ottilo interviewing Jill and David Lassiter in the presence of their attorney, Andrew Graham.”
David took a sip of coffee, acting nonchalant, but Jill thought his hand trembled. She took off the plastic lid and blew on hers though she didn’t know why she bothered. What difference did it make if she burned her tongue? She couldn’t taste anything anyway.
“You have to eat,” David had said last night, “you’re going to get sick.” She’d eaten an apple to appease him, cutting it into thin slices, eating them slowly one by one, realizing when she was halfway through that she couldn’t taste the fruit, could barely even smell it. Lately it was as if all her senses were lost, as if the only things she could taste and feel were fear and longing.
Ottilo opened the folder and perused two documents before sliding them across the table to Andrew. He pulled on his reading glasses and picked up the papers, David edging closer to take a look. Jill kept her eyes on the detective.
“Those are the results of the polygraphs,” Ottilo said, sitting back, rocking on the legs of his chair. There was silence for a long minute while Jill and David read the reports that Andrew passed to them. There was a lot of technical jargon. Ratios, probabilities—what did it all mean?
“As you can see, the results for both of you are inconclusive,” Ottilo said.
“This is why you brought us down here?” David tossed the paper back at the detective. “These don’t say anything and certainly nothing that I didn’t already know. When are you going to stop wasting time on us and find the person who took our child?”
Andrew put a hand on his arm. “Let me,” he said in a low voice, then to Ottilo, “I agree with my client, detective. There is nothing here.”
Ottilo sat up, the legs of the chair landing with a thud on the carpet. “Inconclusive does not mean you passed.”
“What does it mean?” Jill asked.
“It means there are no clear results,” David said.
“No,” Ottilo said. “It means that you aren’t being completely truthful.”
“But it didn’t say we were lying, right?” Jill said.
“It means that the tests are bunk and he knows it,” David said. “They’re almost meaningless, which is why they can’t be used in court.”
“That’s partially true, Mr. Lassiter.” Ottilo smiled, a thin, tight smile. “A prosecutor could not use these results in a courtroom, but it doesn’t mean that they’re worthless. Police use them to steer us either toward or away from suspects.”
“I’ve been waiting for this,” David said, and he sounded both angry and, underneath the anger, afraid. Andrew put a hand on his arm and David sat back in his chair, arms crossed against his chest.
Jill said, “Where are you going with this?”
“Let’s look at the facts to date.” Ottilo spread one of his bony hands and ticked the items off on his long, skeletal fingers. “First, your daughter disappeared from your house. Second, by your own admission there was no sign of forced entry or abduction. Third, there was blood found both in your kitchen and on your patio. Fourth, there have been no ransom demands and no one else has seen your child since the night before when she threw a major tantrum at a Halloween party. Fifth, the polygraphs indicate a certain amount of deceit. What does all of that say to you, Mr. and Mrs. Lassiter?”
“Don’t answer that,” Andrew said to David and Jill. He pushed the papers back across the table and sneered at Ottilo. “Is this why you brought them down here? There is nothing substantive here.”
Ottilo smiled, but he had a nasty gleam in his eyes. “There’s more, Mr. Graham.” At that moment the door opened and Detective Finley stepped in carrying a paper bag. It looked like a normal grocery bag except on one side it had
EVIDENCE
printed in large black letters followed by a check box that someone had filled out. She saw
LASSITER
and
#10
before Finley handed the bag to Ottilo and leaned against the wall behind him with her arms crossed. The lights in the room seemed glaring. Jill leaned forward in her chair, all her muscles tightening. “What’s in that?”
Ottilo didn’t answer. He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and pulled them on; it seemed excruciatingly slow. He opened the bag and reached inside, all the while watching their faces. She was reminded of a crazy magician who had performed at a birthday party Sophia had been invited to last year—the dramatic pauses, the constant gauging of the audience’s reaction. Ottilo lifted out something pink that had reddish-brown splotches. He unfolded it on the table.
“What is that?” David demanded.
“It’s Sophia’s nightgown,” Jill managed to say, feeling strangled. She reached across the table to touch it, but Ottilo pulled it out of her reach.
“We found this near the culvert in the woods behind your house, Mrs. Lassiter,” he said.
“Oh no, please no,” Jill shrank in her chair, staring horrified at the small item of clothing. She thought of putting it on Sophia, of pulling it over her head and helping her button the two tiny pearl buttons. They were still there, smeared in that reddish brown along with the rest of the gown.
“The lab is still testing the blood,” Ottilo said. “Preliminary tests show that it’s A positive. There’s more than a ninety percent likelihood that the blood is Sophia’s. The only question is how it got there.”
“How on earth would we know that?” David’s face had paled. “Jesus Christ.”
Ottilo ignored him, watching Jill, who couldn’t stop staring at the tiny garment. “You’ve lost another child, right, Mr. and Mrs. Lassiter?”
It was a like a blow. Jill’s gaze jumped to the detective’s. She had to clear her throat before answering. “Yes.”
Ottilo held up the folder like a poker hand, surveying its contents for a moment before closing it and placing it back on the table. “Three years ago, shortly before you adopted Sophia?”
He probably had the date in front of him. Jill couldn’t steady her voice. “Yes.”
David said, “This is unbelievable—what does our son’s death have to do with this investigation?”
“Yes, I fail to see the relevance,” Andrew started, but Ottilo held up a hand to stop him even as he consulted the folder again.
“Your son was nine months old when he died?”
“Ethan,” Jill whispered.
“Excuse me?”
“His name was Ethan.” She wrapped her arms around her stomach and focused on the tabletop, afraid that she might throw up.
“Ethan. Right. And how did Ethan die?”
Andrew said, “Now look here,” but David spoke over him. “SIDS. The doctors said it was SIDS.”
“Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.” Ottilo said each word slowly, and he was still staring at Jill, his cold gray eyes boring into her. “And you were the one who found him?”
Before Jill could answer, David spoke for her, “What the hell is this? Why are you asking about our son?”
Ottilo’s eyes didn’t leave Jill’s face as said rapidly, “He cried a lot, right? Do you remember telling the police that your son ‘cried more than seemed normal’?”
“I don’t remember—it was over three years ago.” Jill blinked rapidly, trying to hold back tears. She didn’t want to cry in front of them. It wasn’t true. She did remember. She remembered all of it, everything that had happened that day framed in excruciating detail in her memory. She tried not to think about it, but already she could hear her footsteps climbing the apartment stairs to the second floor, see the dust motes hanging in the sunlight spilling from the skylight across the narrow hallway, obscuring the closed door that sat in shadow at the end of it. She could still remember that she’d felt grateful—oh, dear God—because he’d taken a longer nap, because she had been in need of a rest and he was still sleeping. Grateful until she’d climbed the stairs to check on him, until she’d walked down that endless narrow hallway and knew that something was wrong.
“Sophia was a crier, too, right?” Ottilo said. “She was pretty strong-willed, isn’t that right?”
“Do you have a point, Detective?” Andrew sounded angry. “I consider this harassment.”
Jill closed her eyes and ducked her head, pressing her hands hard against her temples, but she couldn’t stop the past from surging forward. Like floodwaters breaking over a wall, her memory of that day engulfed her, pulling her under and into that hallway again looking at that door. The same hall and the same door that she visited over and over again in her dreams as if dreaming about it could somehow change the outcome.
The voices fell away and she was standing there again in the silence. The terrible silence. It shouldn’t have been so quiet. Her footsteps stopped outside the door, listening, even as she put her hand on the cool metal knob and turned it. She opened the door, the feeling of dread like going off a high dive at the pool as a child, the absolute knee-knocking fear and aloneness of that moment, followed by a stomach-dropping free fall into nothingness when she saw the still, small body of her son lying facedown in his crib.
A loud thud against the table jolted her back. Detective Ottilo had thrown a book in the center. “What is that?” David said even as Jill reached for it, knowing it instantly by the green marbled cover. “It’s mine,” she cried as Ottilo pulled it out of reach. “Give it back!”
The detective ignored her, opening the book and turning the pages instead. Photos of Ethan, all of the pages were Ethan, each image lovingly attached to the heavy paper pages with old-fashioned black paper corners. They were all the same setting, the same approximate pose, but taken over time, showing Ethan sleeping in his crib—one a week since they’d brought him home from the hospital. Thirty-nine photos, two per page, all of them in black-and-white.
She’d started it as an interesting experiment, to see how quickly an infant changed, but after two months it had turned into something more—an art project, her own untitled exhibition, a personal tribute to her son.
The detective stopped on the last page with its two photos. The first, at the top of the page, had been taken the week before Ethan died. He was on his side, his eyes closed, one little hand curled in a fist, the other resting against his side. The photo below it was of the empty crib. She’d taken it that first Friday, two days after his death, at the same time that she’d taken the others, going up to that room alone, overwhelmed by grief and needing to express it in some more personal way.
“What
is
this, Mrs. Lassiter?” Ottilo said, tapping the last page.
David was trying to see the photos. Ottilo turned the album to show it to him and Jill saw confusion and something else—repulsion?
“It was just a way to remember him, a way to frame those moments.” She stumbled through an explanation of her art while the detective stared at her the way she’d once seen a cat staring at a bird. He waited for her to finish before he glanced at the other detective.
“We thought these were strikingly similar to some other photographs you’ve taken,” Finley said, opening the folder she carried and slowly and deliberately laying out a series of photographs as if they were tarot cards while everyone at the table watched in silence.
Each one was a shot of a child apparently sleeping in his parents’ arms. It was only if you looked closely that you could see that the children weren’t alive.
“These are personal,” Jill said, “they belong to the families who asked me to take them.”
“These photos look an awful lot like the photos you took of your son,” Ottilo said, aligning the album with the row of photos.
“They’re supposed to look just like those photos, they’re supposed to help the parents with grieving.”
“What it looks like, Mrs. Lassiter, is that you have a preoccupation with death.”
“That’s absurd,” Jill said, glancing at David, but there was something in his face—he was thinking about what the detective said.
Ottilo said, “When Ethan died, you were the one who found him, Mrs. Lassiter, and when Sophia disappeared, you were the last one to see her. Don’t you think that’s odd, Mrs. Lassiter?”
“I didn’t do anything to Ethan.” Jill’s voice shook, but with rage as much as fear. “He was my son, Detective. My son.”
The detective’s eyes bored into her. “And Sophia? Did you do something to Sophia? Tell me what happened and we can end this charade right now.”
“What charade?” Andrew said.
“Mrs. Lassiter, did you hurt your daughter?”
Jill recoiled. “No!”